New planned regulation might require British drone users to take safety awareness tests in order to fly unmanned vehicles over 250 grams of weight. Drones over 250g—i.e. most professional and recreational drones, apart from the cheapest toy versions—might also be banned altogether from flying near airports or above 121 metres (400 ft) of altitude, with the aim of avoiding collisions with […]

Artificial Intelligence and driverless technology featured prominently in UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond’s budget speech, in which he announced new investment and tax breaks for technology companies, in the latest bid to shore up the sector ahead of Brexit. Life sciences, immersive technology, 5G, and FinTech were other key fields Hammond mentioned in his […]

Ride-hailing service Uber has struck a deal with Volvo to purchase 24,000 XC90 SUVs between 2019 and 2021, with the aim to convert them into its driverless fleet, Bloomberg has revealed. Each XC90 costs about £35,000 on the market, and the Financial Times pegged the value of the deal at around £1 billion. Uber has already […]

China has surpassed the Unites States and become the country with most supercomputers in the world. Out of the 500 fastest mainframes on the planet, China now owns 202, well ahead of the United States’ 143 and Japan’s 35 systems, a Top500 survey revealed. A previous survey published just five month ago in June had found that the […]

UK Artificial Intelligence company BenevolentAI has launched a new award to help non-profits and charities use AI to speed up their medical research and create new therapies. Created in partnership with the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) , the award will be granted every year to one applicant charity, which will get access to BenevolentAI’s technology […]

Graphcore, a Bristol-based company whose processors could dramatically speed up the training of machine learning systems, is bound to raise £38.2 million ($50 million) in a Series C funding round by Sequoia Capital. The company is expected to start shipping its chips, called Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) by early 2018. In October, Graphcore shared new data […]

Uber has signed a contract with US space agency Nasa to design software for self-driving flying taxi. The cab-hailing service’s chief product officer Jeff Holden revealed the news at the Lisbon’s Web Summit; he also announced that the company will start testing so-called “UberAir” flying cabs around Los Angeles in 2020. (It is understood that the […]

Alphabet’s self driving car unit Waymo is about to launch a fully autonomous self-driving cab service. That means: there will be no human driver in the car to take over in case of an emergency— although, in the initial rollout phase, passengers will be welcomed by Waymo concierges in the back seat. Riding in the […]

Chinese face-recognition technology company Megvii has raised £350 million from a group of investors, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Ant Financial and state-backed Chinese funds, Bloomberg reports. Existing investor Foxconn Technology Group—a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that counts Apple among its customers—also partook in the round. The company had already secured backing from the Russia-China Investment fund, […]

Facebook has struck a deal with PayPal, which will allow users to access the payment service directly from Facebook Messenger. Users will now be able to link their Messenger app to their PayPal account in order to send to and receive money from other users on the platform. The development expands on a previous partnership between the social […]